Art Museum Mixes Pomp and Hint of Pop

Exterior view of the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — This city is growing up, and I count myself among those who see that as a mixed blessing. Over the last decade or so it has embarked on its most ambitious cultural building boom in a generation, adding a new dimension to a city whose notable civic monuments have famously been its freeways. But with exceptions like Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, these projects have often failed to live up to Los Angeles’s great tradition of architectural experimentation.

The new Broad Contemporary Art Museum is no different. An addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it had been viewed as a way of cleaning up what many saw as a muddle of mismatched buildings. Beyond that, many hoped it would serve as a striking monument to the city’s growing power in the contemporary art world.

Designed by Renzo Piano, the new addition takes a mostly pragmatic approach to the site. Mr. Piano reorganizes the complex along a strong central axis, giving it a clarity that it desperately needed. His top-floor galleries, which take advantage of the exquisite California sunlight, will no doubt thrill those whose main focus is how a museum’s design makes the art look.

But architecture is about more than the quality of light. It’s where our dreams collide with practical realities, which makes it perhaps the most difficult of arts. As a monument to the civic aspirations of Los Angeles, Mr. Piano’s design is remarkably uninspired. There is little of the formal freedom that is at the heart of the city’s architectural legacy; nor is there much evidence of the structural refinement that we have come to expect in Mr. Piano’s best work. The museum’s monumental travertine form and lipstick-red exterior stairways are a curious mix of pomposity and pop-culture references. It’s an architecture without conviction.

To those with long memories, the design’s failures may merely seem like more of the same. The original 1965 complex, designed by William L. Pereira & Associates, was a pseudo-Modernist complex set around a central court and reflecting pools in imitation of Lincoln Center in New York. Within months of the museum’s opening, oil began oozing up from the nearby La Brea Tar Pits, and the pools had to be paved over.

About 20 years later the museum tried again, hiring Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer to conceal Mr. Pereira’s complex behind a towering new entry portal along Wilshire Boulevard. The addition’s limestone and glass-brick facade only made things worse, transforming a second-rate work of architecture into kitsch.

Salvation seemed at hand a few years ago, when the museum’s board selected the moody architectural visionary Rem Koolhaas to rethink the sprawling complex. With typical cheek, he suggested demolishing the entire ensemble except the plaza, which would be used to house offices. Resting above the plaza on concrete columns, the new museum was conceived as a vast warehouse for art beneath a translucent tentlike roof.

Mr. Koolhaas’s design reflected a shrewd awareness of what made Los Angeles one of the most original urban creations of the 20th century. The elevated concrete slab eerily evoked a displaced fragment of elevated freeway; the translucent plastic dome, supported by curving steel beams, mirrored the early fantasies of Archigram, a group of British architects who saw the city’s informality and apparent lack of cultural depth as a model of social freedom in the 1960s.

In the end the board could not raise the money. And the boldness of Mr. Koolhaas’s vision presented a challenge for Mr. Piano. How to live up to such audacity? Would the refinement of Mr. Piano’s architecture look too timid?

Photo

A view of Richard Serra's "Band," on display in a first-floor gallery of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

He began reasonably enough. To give some order to the campus, he created a new open-air entrance pavilion that connects a generous plaza along Wilshire Boulevard in the front to a public park and underground parking structure in back. A covered walkway running parallel to Wilshire connects the pavilion to the old campus on one side and to the Broad addition on the other. By situating all the circulation at the rear of the complex along open-air walkways, Mr. Piano creates a strong visual connection to both the park and more distant views of the Santa Monica Mountains. More important, he clears up space inside so it can be turned over to the art.

This approach seems sensible enough, but it never engages the city’s singularity. The great architects who built along Wilshire Boulevard in the 1920s were among the first to celebrate the emergence of American car culture, creating low-flung structures whose horizontal lines echoed the traffic flowing along the boulevard. By contrast Mr. Piano broke the museum into two identical blocks, which appear lifeless from the street. And if to some the entrance pavilion’s flat, square canopy brings to mind a gas station, the reference falls flat. I’ve seen gas stations in Southern California with far more architectural ambition.

Just as perplexing is the clash of aesthetic languages. Mounted on top of the museum’s aged travertine blocks, the sleek white panels of the sawtooth roof seem oddly incongruous. An exterior escalator conjures obvious associations with the Pompidou Center in Paris, Mr. Piano’s breakthrough project with Richard Rogers in the 1970s. But there is none of the Pompidou’s ebullient sense of play. Instead, the structural matrix of bright red columns that support the escalator and walkway canopies seems flimsy.

I suspect that museum officials are nervously aware of the addition’s shortcomings, so much so that they have hidden the structures behind artworks. Two enormous banners adorning the building along Wilshire Boulevard disguise the main facade. A sculpture by Chris Burden of vintage streetlamps culled from various neighborhoods in the city block the view from the street to the entrance pavilion.

Many will be tempted to forgive Mr. Piano once they enter the galleries. Since his Menil Collection building opened in Houston in 1986, Mr. Piano’s use of light has inspired fervent admiration. The Broad Museum may be the closest he has come since then to creating an atmosphere in which viewers’ awareness of natural shifts in daylight heightens their experience of the art. From inside the galleries, the bleached oak floors and the intricate structural system supporting the sawtooth roof have a relaxed, informal quality. The sharp angle of the roof’s louvers opens the space up to the California sky.

None of this distracts from the art. On the contrary, the soft light, filtered through a system of screens, helps rivet the eye. Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” looks as if it were about to spring off its pedestal; every nuance in tone and color in a Jasper Johns painting comes vibrantly to life.

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The subtle shifts in mood continue as you descend through the building. The regularity of the second-floor galleries is momentarily broken by a louvered wall that allows visitors to catch glimpses of the palms arranged by the artist Robert Irwin on the sidewalk along the boulevard. The south gallery on the first floor is pierced by a long window, so that as you circle the artworks, you can gaze out at the park in the rear. (The rusted steel plates of Richard Serra’s “Band” look fabulous in this generously proportioned room. When the same work was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the spring, it looked comparatively cramped, as if struggling to find room to breathe.)

There are other reasons for optimism. The museum is planning a second expansion phase, also designed by Mr. Piano, calling for a 40,000-square-foot warehouse space that will be used for temporary exhibitions and enveloped in a field of palm trees. Mr. Piano said it will also have a sawtooth roof structure but simpler than the one on the Broad building, in keeping with the industrial look of its design. And the museum’s director, Michael Govan, said he still hopes the worst parts of the old complex will be improved, although he acknowledged that any such move is years away.

But even if you grant Mr. Piano his due as a competent planner, it’s hard not to chide him for his thin, superficial reading of Los Angeles. Over the last decade or so, buildings like the Getty Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall and Caltrans Headquarters (for the state’s transportation authority) have added a new civic dimension to the city’s architecture. They have also exposed a longstanding battle over the city’s identity, between those who revel in its informality and those who seek to raise its status by following more traditional architectural models.

Photo

The flat canopy of the entrance pavilion at the new Broad museum.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

On one side are people like Mr. Koolhaas who believe that Los Angeles’s emergence as the greatest experimental laboratory in 20th-century American architecture was rooted in a rejection of worn-out East Coast traditions. From this point of view the most important architectural achievements — from the streamlined department stores that rose on Wilshire Boulevard in the 1920s to the residences designed by Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra and Mr. Gehry — sprang from an effort to come to terms with the city’s strangeness, its urban sprawl, its embrace of car culture, its mix of natural and artificial landscapes. The most inspiring recent architecture has tended to build on that legacy while taking a more enlightened view of local and environmental concerns.

On the other side are those who embrace East Coast models as an antidote to the city’s ethereality and all that freedom. Such repressive conservatism is driven by Old World anxieties about mixing high and low as well as a nagging sense of cultural insecurity. And in many ways it seemed to crystallize in the travertine geometries of Richard Meier’s staid 1997 Getty Center, a $1.3 billion cultural fortress that looks down its nose at the city from atop an exclusive Brentwood hilltop. Cars are banned from its precincts.

The Broad Museum seems lost somewhere in the middle, like a bicyclist trapped on a freeway. If the flimsy entrance canopy and covered walkways are intended as a riff on Los Angeles’s pop culture traditions, they seems no more than an afterthought. And the Broad Museum’s ostentatious facade seems oblivious to its surroundings.

What compensation you’re left with is the gorgeous California light. The rest may protect you from the occasional rainstorm, but it’s not engaging architecture.

Nuts and Bolts

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the Miracle Mile district, midway between downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica, at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and Curson Avenues; (323) 857-6000; lacma.org. Information about parking is available on the museum Web site.

HOURS AND ADMISSION On Friday the Broad Contemporary will be open for members only from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the rest of the museum will be open from noon to 6 p.m. From Saturday through Monday, the entire museum will be open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and admission will be free. Regular hours are Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Regular admission: adults, $12; 62 and older, and students 18 and older with ID, $8; 17 and under, free; after 5 p.m., pay what you wish.

TALKS AND TOURS Docent tours are offered most days at 1 p.m. and last 20 to 25 minutes. Spotlight talks on single works are offered most days at 1:30 p.m. and last 15 minutes. Longer guided tours are offered weekly. Schedules and topics at lacma.org/events/Calendar.aspx.

FOOD The museum has a full-service indoor-outdoor restaurant and bar, Pentimento, (323) 857-4761, as well as the Plaza Cafe. Both are open during most museum hours.

IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD The County Museum complex shares Hancock Park with the child-friendly La Brea Tar Pits and its Page Museum; tarpits.org. Nearby, to the north and northwest, are the fashionable shopping districts of Robertson Boulevard, Melrose Avenue and Third Street, with many dining options, like the movie-industry institution the Ivy, 113 North Robertson Boulevard, (310) 274-8303; and the popular new southern Italian restaurant Terroni, 7605 Beverly Boulevard, (323) 954-0300.

Information about Los Angeles hotels and restaurants is available online in the Los Angeles travel guide (under “Plan Your Trip”) at travel.nytimes.com.